Category Archives: Across Color Lines

Across Color Lines, Health and dignity, Housing, International, Organizing, Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, Public Education

Nijmie 101: Get to know me

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Here are some snapshots from my organizing over the years in terms of some of the issues and campaigns that I’ve worked on, and the trajectory of my political orientation and theory of change.

 

Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

A New Poor People’s Campaign on the Dig (audio)

History of the Poverty Initiative (Kairos Center -) one of the two national co-convening organizations of the Poor People’s Campaign

Ending Poverty: Immersion in the Mississippi Delta (article)

Katrina: Poverty, Race and Ethics (article)

Healthcare is a Human Right

On building a diverse working class movement on the Dig (audio)

The Strategic Significance of Healthcare as a Human Right with Sarah Jaffe (article)

Revolutionary Common Sense on Hack the Union (video)

Education is a Human Right

Campaign for Nonviolent Schools (article)

MMPTV Episode 6: “No Education, No Life!” (preview)

Housing is a Human Right

Supporting the Community Leadership Institute in Philadelphia (article)

Community Preservation Network (article)

International Human Rights

International Women’s Peace Service (article)

The Landless Workers Movement in Brazil (MST) (article)

Co-founder: 

Media Mobilizing Project

Put People First! PA

Restarted and Former Executive Director

Philadelphia Student Union

Across Color Lines, Organizing, Vision

How to keep the political revolution going in PA

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When I posted this on Facebook the morning after the PA primary. . . .

“Bernie Sanders won 30 counties in PA. Primarily the rural counties. The counties people disdain as “Pennsyltucky”. The counties young people move out of because there is no work. The ones most people in Philly or Pittsburgh have never heard of. They may not identify as liberal or progressive. They do not use the phrase “white supremacist capitalist hetero-patriarchy” on a regular basis. Yet they voted for a platform of breaking up big banks, making healthcare a public good, and free higher education. Is that sinking in? They understand that everything that Wall Street has is ours because Wall Street owns us, it owns the people we elect; and all of our taxes, rent, fines, interest, fees, energy, water, land, and bodies go in service to it. They can see it even more clearly than a lot of us in Philly. The places that capital has abandoned are the ones where something else is taking root.”

I had no idea it would resonate so much with people here in PA and around the country, with over 600 likes and 274 shares.

I think for many folks it was an interesting twist on what they initially felt as a disappointing election result. So I wanted to follow up and share some strategy thoughts for people who want to continue on with making an actual political revolution here in PA, that outlasts any one election cycle. These thoughts are based on 25 years of history and current experience with people’s struggles, which I have been involved in since the age of 14.

We need permanently organized communities. That means we need everyday leaders who live near each other and who are connected to each other and committed for the long haul. These cores of leaders then must be connected to other cores locally, regionally, statewide and beyond. Building the power to make the kinds of changes that we need to put people before profits is not going to happen overnight. Mobilizing even large groups of people to one or multiple actions is insufficient to the task of shifting power in society.

We have an unprecedented opportunity to unite poor and dispossessed people across racial lines and all other lines of division; and we need to understand racism and gender oppression One of the most interesting things about my FB post is that although I was critiquing the kind of politics that privileges language learned in elite educational spaces over material conditions and lived experiences, the phrase “white supremacist capitalist hetero-patriarchy” was nevertheless shared hundreds of times. Which is not a bad thing. We who believe in freedom need to understand that the range of different ways poor and dispossessed people experience day to day life in our system are a living legacy of the harmful divide and conquer strategies that began on this land in the 17th century and continued to evolve at the hands of elites from there.

A critical mass of people is rejecting the idea that poverty is a moral failing and realizing that our system itself reproduces poverty. There is tremendous power in finally ridding ourselves of the pox of shame and humiliation that comes with not being able to meet our basic needs whether that’s a new experience or not.

The left/liberal and right/conservative boxes are killing us. At the ground level, the two major political parties use poor and working people at the ballot box and then largely abandon us when the vote is over because they do not actually represent our interests. Spending all of our time faux-fighting people on the “left” or on the “right” is a distraction from understanding that our world is much more oriented toward “top” and “bottom”. We need independent politics.

Study and education are crucial.We have a tendency in our culture to leap before we look and shoot before we aim. We rush into trying to change things before we understand what’s been done before, and what lessons have been learned. If we are serious, not just playing around or tinkering around the edges, then we know what an awesome responsibility it is to try to change the course of history. Would you trust that responsibility to someone who knows nothing of history?

Transforming human relationships through practice. Our society is currently set up to keep people who are dealing with a lot of the same problems in isolation from each other. Not to mention that we have a long history of segregation along lines of “race” and color, we speak different languages, and we have different customs and cultures. Yet we have to manage to get together, not at some fictional point in the future, but as soon as possible. And working together, being together, creating strategy together and taking collective action, is not simple given how fractured we are. It has to be a conscious leadership practice that brings marginalized people into the center, cultivates deep trust and relationship, and helps expand each of our individual circles of concern beyond our immediate family or people who look like us.

For more information on organizations working to be vehicles for these kinds of practices and approaches see:
Put People First! PA
A New Poor People’s Campaign for Today

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Across Color Lines, Health and dignity, Organizing, Refugees, Vision

Refuge, Reason and Resolve

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My mother's grandparents, immigrants from the Levant

Pictured: My mother’s maternal grandparents, immigrants from the Levant (at the time known as “Greater Syria” including what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel), pre WWI

There is a petition circulating right now in Pennsylvania asking Governor Wolf to reject Syrian refugees. Over 70,000 people have signed it. One of the most frequent reasons petition signers give for their position is that there are hundreds of thousands, millions even, of people in our state who are suffering, and who don’t have what we need. If you signed this petition you may have real concerns about your neighbors, friends and even family members who are trying to make ends meet and dealing with unemployment or underemployment, challenges around housing, healthcare, education or childcare, or caught up in the system in some way.

And you’re right that there are altogether too many people here in Pennsylvania who are struggling. One fifth of our children are living in poverty. We have over 15,000 homeless people, and 50,000 thousand people locked in cages due to mass incarceration. The number of our homeless veterans increased by nearly 50% in the last six years. Nearly one and a half million Pennsylvanians live in poverty. That’s over 1 million/10% of whites and 28.7%/370 thousand African-Americans. A full-time, full-year minimum wage worker earns $15,080 annually, an amount still below the poverty line for a family of four.

However, we have to ask ourselves, are the Syrian refugees the source of these problems? Will not admitting refugees fleeing war and poverty solve the problems that we as poor and working people have in Pennsylvania? Will refusing refugees help homeless veterans? Will it house those who need housing? Will it provide medical care to those who need it? Will it feed the people who need fed? Will it educate the students who need education?

Not only will refusing refugees fail to make any of these situations better, it also won’t create more resources for any of these things – because as we can see, we are already don’t have them. The only way to get what we need is to stop blaming each other and come together. By doing this, we can begin to understand how we got here and what we need to do to change it. We only get what we are organized to take and we aren’t asking for anything but the basics that we need to live. You are right to sense that the priorities of the powers and principalities are not working in your interests. But the refugees are not to blame.

Let us not allow ourselves to be motivated by fear. Let us now allow ourselves to be motivated by despair. Let us not be fooled into thinking that there isn’t enough to go around. Love knows no boundaries and no borders. Let us feel and be motivated by love. And in doing so work for a world in which the last, whomever and wherever they are, shall be first.

Discussion Questions:

Pennsylvania has a flat tax system meaning that whether your family makes $15,000 or $15,000,000 dollars, we are all taxed at the same rate. Do you think that is fair? Why or why not?

Has anyone in your family/anyone you know ever held a job that hurt/polluted themselves, other people, or the air, land, and water? How do you feel about the choices that we have to make to survive?

What is the history of your family? How did your ancestors come to be in the US? Were they brought here by force as enslaved people? Were they immigrants? Refugees? Are they Indigenous people?

Have you or someone in your family gone to war? How did it impact you/them? What were the stated reasons for the war? What were the real reasons?

Sources and further reading:
http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/index.ssf/2010/03/living_below_poverty_in_pennsy.html
http://www.spotlightonpoverty.org/map-detail.aspx?state=Pennsylvania
http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/philadelphia/62343-despite-national-trend-more-veterans-homeless-in-pennsylvania

Across Color Lines

My Own Private Vigilante

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PSU members and me, 2008It was the spring of 2007 and  my students were amped about the US social forum in Atlanta.  I was the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Student Union and also organizing at Sayre High School in West Philadelphia. My students were so excited and I committed to taking a group of about a dozen students to Atlanta, and then had to set about figuring out how to do that logistically and monetarily.

What began with those students resulted in PSU effectively organizing the bus from Philly to Atlanta for the whole city that would enable us to go. We had to figure out everything and transportation, food and accommodations for all the students and staff members that came along was not easy.

Through some friends I was able to secure housing for all of us in an apartment complex where the residents were going to be away during the time of the forum.  We got in to Atlanta, had to carry our bags to the restaurant where the person with our key was, then truck out to the where we were staying.

It was a trying trip.  A dizzying array of workshops and activities; the Georgia summer heat; I believe I was approached by some kind of undercover agent who started questioning me about Philly groups and people (strange because at the time I was not wearing a social forum badge); and a notebook of mine went missing.  Being right in downtown Atlanta meant that my students’ attention was constantly drawn to the kaleidoscope of tricked out cars with rims, hydraulics, and candy coated gloss constantly riding by on the strip.

One of my student’s birthdays fell during the forum and we got him a cake to celebrate. We were all back at the apartment around midnight, singing happy birthday (quietly I remember, because we were being thoughtful about how late it was) when I heard a knock on the apartment door.  I thought at first that one of the students was pranking me when I looked through the peephole and saw no one there.  I opened the door, looked outside and to my shock saw an armed white male in plain clothes off to the left of the doorframe with his arms extended.  In his hands was a gun pointed toward the ground like you see when cops are getting ready to barge into a situation, and his finger was on the trigger.

I immediately closed the door to put a barrier between him and the young people.  I was thinking about the students circled in the living room on the other side of the door, eating cake and laughing and how I had a duty to protect them and would do so at any and all cost.  Thinking about my body language and tone and not wanting to escalate the situation I began to engage him.  I wanted to be calm yet extremely firm.  “What is going on?” “You can’t be here right now,” he said. I explained that we had permission from the residents of the apartment to use their space for the week.  He said, “This is a private apartment complex and you are not allowed to have so many people staying here.”

We went back and forth for a couple of minutes during which time he put away his gun.  I remained insistent that we were within our rights to be staying in the apartment and made it clear that under no circumstances was he coming inside.   When I asked why he was profiling us he said that someone who lives in the complex had called him.  I think that I remember him saying that he was an off-duty cop.  He ended by telling me that the residents would get a citation and possibly get evicted for having us stay in the apartment.

After he left, I went back into the apartment, shocked and numbed.  I had to tell the young people that a man with a gun had just been standing right on the other side of our front door.  I told them what had happened, that presumably, someone or several people from the apartment complex had called this off-duty cop/vigilante on us because they felt that “we didn’t belong there”, and he took it upon himself to come over and check out what was going on.

I was so angry and made no effort to hide this from the students.  We had to come up with a plan, some kind of response.  After checking in for a few minutes, we decided to go outside.  If they think we don’t belong here, we should show ourselves to them, to contest their cowardly actions, right here right now.  We’re going to show them that we’re not afraid.  So the 12 or so of us, went outside, and stood there.  There was a light rain coming down and it was after midnight, but we stood there, daring the people watching us from inside their apartments between their blinds to come out themselves and meet us, or do something else about it.  But we weren’t going away.

I was angry about the whole situation. I was angry that we had been referred to stay in a place where that would happen to us.  I was angry that the folks who rented the apartment didn’t warn us or give us any concept of what the people living there were like.  I was angry that a vigilante came to our door and came within feet of my students with a fucking gun!

There is no doubt in my mind that we were profiled because of the racial fears of the folks in the apartment building on seeing a group of Black youth in “their” space.  The thing that makes me the angriest and saddest is that not one of those people who were looking at us, watching us, made the effort to introduce themselves or to talk to us and ask us directly what we were doing there. Instead, they called on an armed man to intervene for them.

I’m glad that I was there physically in between the vigilante and my students.  In my (to some) racially ambiguous skin perhaps I was able to elicit a different reaction from this man than if someone else had been at the door.  There is no neat and tidy ending to this story, only an ongoing fierce commitment to act every day on the conviction that #blacklifematters and to consciously dismantle the barriers that keep us from being able to see each other as full human beings.